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Posts Tagged ‘Implementation’

How Random Is Microsoft’s Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe?

After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.

But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really?

That’s exactly what the good people behind Slovakian tech news site DSL.sk set out to discover, based on the current implementation and code found on www.browserchoice.eu. Their findings were quite interesting, as they seem to suggest that the selection isn’t really that random as one would imagine, and that Microsoft is not doing itself any favors at all, when in fact it may even be giving Google’s Chrome browser a bit of an edge.

It took me some creative Google Translating to figure out how the team got to its conclusion, but finally a Skype chat with one of the reporters at DSL.sk cleared things up for me.

The page on www.browserchoice.eu is static, running nothing but Javascript. The guys at DSL.sk basically automatically loaded that page tens of thousands of times, and they kept score of which browsers were shown in which order for each of those instances. And not only did they test this sufficiently on this page, but DSL.sk did the same for the core Javascript algorithm that triggers the random ordering.

The test were run using Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 machine, because the ballot screen will pop up in IE for users who install the relevant Windows Update and have set Microsoft’s browser as default.

More than once out of every four hits, the page would show Google Chrome on the far left, and Internet Explorer would only make it to the first spot in 13,8% of page loads (scoring well below all four other browsers). In fact, in over 50% of all page hits, Internet Explorer would come out to the far right spot of the five browser choices shown on the screen.

Here’s a table with the stats – the titles are in Slovakian but are simply indicating the order of the browser and its average position in the right column:

What’s most apparent is that Google Chrome scored ‘best’ out of five for all 3 first spots on the browser choice screen, and that Internet Explorer appeared on the far right way more than rival browsers. We should note that this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a conspiracy going on – perhaps tens of thousands of hits are simply not enough to produce relevant results, or the results are skewed for a different reason. DSL, for one, claims the test results are quite stable and don’t seem to alter much when the number of loads keeps on increasing.

Be that as it may, it’s also worth noting that the ‘first spot’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also the ‘best spot’ – eye movement research could well conclude that the middle, far right or any other of the spots is actually the most beneficial one.

For what it’s worth, the DSL team says they had to make two minor changes to the code in order to run their tests mimicking the real behavior of the page as closely as possible, so theoretically the results could end up being more random than they appear based on the results cited above when the browser choice screen actually goes live.

Also, different browsers produced different results, although it didn’t matter much whether IE6, IE7 or IE8 was used for testing. Tests were also run in Firefox, baring completely different results, although there was never an equal distribution between browsers whatsoever, so even then the ‘randomness’ can be questioned.

Do you think the selection on the browser choice screen will end up being completely random, or will more exhaustive research ultimately show that there’s a consistent pattern of browser selection happening here?

(Hat tip to Patrik Hornik)

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Rogers getting Android 2.1-equipped Acer Liquid e this spring

Rogers getting Android 2.1-equipped Acer Liquid e this spring originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Symbian S^3 officially announced, previewed on video

The time has finally come for us to see Symbian’s milestone shift toward finger-friendly operation in motion. Firstly, to allay any fears that it’d lack all the modern amenities, we’ll note that kinetic scrolling, swiping, and pinch-to-zoom are all present and accounted for, while a “visual multi-tasking” option allows you to see the open applications in an interface not a million miles away from the Pre’s card implementation. Customization is also a big deal in the S^3 UI, with multiple Home Screen pages available, accompanied by a litany of widgets you can add and manage. The media player application looks like a homage (read: copy) of Apple’s Cover Flow UI, right down to the album covers flipping around to reveal the track listing. We’re not complaining, we consider that a very intelligent and pleasing way to browse through music. Go check out the moving picture show after the break.

Continue reading Symbian S^3 officially announced, previewed on video

Symbian S^3 officially announced, previewed on video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple retaliates: requests US import ban on Nokia phones

As expected, Apple just responded to Nokia’s ITC request to ban Apple device imports with a US embargo request of its very own. Notice of Apple’s complaint (without any detail) was posted yesterday on the website of the International Trade Commission — a government agency tasked with protecting the US market from unfair trade practices. As you might recall, the whole Nokia v. Apple legal spat started with Nokia suing Apple for infringing upon Nokia patents relating to GSM, UMTS, and WiFi; a claim later expanded to include “implementation patents” covering a wide range of items including camera sensors and touchscreens. While the ITC hasn’t agreed to investigate either Nokia’s or Apple’s complaints, it is customary to do so with investigations usually taking about 15 months to complete. We’ll post more when the details of Apple’s patent infringement complaint are revealed.

Apple retaliates: requests US import ban on Nokia phones originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone credit card reader to be demoed at CES

Filed under: Hardware, iPhone, App Store

Coming this CES (which is actually next week): a complete credit card transaction accessory and service for your iPhone. If this thing works as expected, you might actually see it in more than a few places (think: street vendors that will take credit card payments). A company called Mophie is planning to show off an add-on that works with an app to deliver credit card payments through Square, a payment service recently started up by Jack Dorsey, a Twitter alumni. This is one of a couple such systems that will be vying to fulfill the function (and probably take a few cents from each transaction for their troubles), but so far all we’ve really got is demos, no actual releases planned.

But maybe we’ll hear more at CES. There’s all kinds of applications here — a solid, working implementation of a service like this could end up being extremely popular for anybody that regularly needs to conduct transactions out in the field.

TUAWiPhone credit card reader to be demoed at CES originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft and Kia formalize partnership, Uvo is born

Microsoft and Kia formalize partnership, Uvo is born originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chevy Volt to get an iPhone app

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store

Want to check the charge on your electric car? There’s going to be an app for that — our friends at Engadget report that the upcoming Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid electric car will have an iPhone app that goes along with it. Features aren’t firmed up yet, but ideas being passed around after a demo at last week’s LA Auto Show include both setting up functions inside the car like scheduling when a charge happens (to take advantage of late-night power rates) and receiving notifications from the car, including when it’s charged and/or when you forgot to plug it in for the night or other worrying situations like that. I’d love to even see an app that can track mileage from the car, or give you diagnostic information when something is wrong.

Obviously, this is pretty pie-in-the-sky at this point (and implementation is obviously tougher than coming up with ideas for it), but I’m all for it. With the advent of the iPhone and all of the things it can do, it’s quickly becoming a one-stop shop for communication between all your various networks and appliances. Why not have your car text you when it needs something? Oh wait, I’ve got to go — my car just texted me that it’s lonely out there in the parking lot. Back in a bit.

TUAWChevy Volt to get an iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Real-Time Search Is Now Live

Google turned on real-time search on its main site this morning with little fanfare, after a huge announcement and demo earlier this week. Go to google.com and search for a news query (Obama Nobel will work) or for something like “marshallk on twitter” and you’ll see a live streaming section of the page displaying messages from Twitter, newly updated web pages and other real-time information.

Yahoo! announced its integration of Twitter alone in its search results today, but it’s buried in obscure parts of the site and isn’t based on access to the full Twitter fire hose. Google’s implementation is much better than what Yahoo! or Bing are doing and is going to introduce millions of people to the concept of real-time search for the first time.

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As we wrote on Monday: The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done.

The new Google Real-Time Search includes far more than just Twitter results. In addition to newly updated web pages it will also include updates from users of MySpace, Facebook, open-source Twitter alternative Identi.ca and more.

As we wrote in our recent research report on the real-time web and its future, Google was already quite strong on real-time search with the addition of Google News results and timely Google Suggest items to the search experience.

Google has been working on real-time search for years. In the spring of 2006, the story goes, Google launched Google Finance onto the Web and was promptly dismayed to find that the service didn’t appear in a Google search for its own name later that day. It was after that, and a few other similar experiences, that Google engineers created an algorithm called QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness. QDF determines when results for a query need to be augmented with the newest content available, in addition to the content with the highest PageRank.

The inclusion of this type of real-time search result into the Google results page could be of comparable significance to the addition of news, videos and images via the OneBox program in 2006.

Thanks to Bob Ngu on Twitter for the heads up that this was live.

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